Web & Community

This is the ModDB group for the Half-Life Creations website! Half-Life Creations was conceived in 2006 then created in 2007 by Thomas "Editor321" and James "Minuit". It was designed to be a haven for modelers, skinners, coders and developers of all types that have a focus with Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and anything related to the both of them. It is the mission statement of this web site to provide a professional atmosphere in one of the most well respected gaming communities on the face of the earth. Third party developers have shown us through Counter Strike, Day of Defeat and many other official modifications can be improved upon by the talent in these communites. We hope to build a strong community where all developers can chat, exchange ideas, release work and find web hosting for their own projects.

We on TOP 100 thanks for the incredible support!

Since a couple of weeks before, we been teasing you with something called SSAO. What exactly is that, and why is so important? Grab a cup of tea, big explanation coming!

SSAO stands for Screen space ambient occlusion. SSAO+, which is our version, tends to corrects the artifacts of SSAO, and uses new different algorithms, while not that accurate, renders the scene in a much faster way.

A super easy explanation (borrowed from DarkSystems):

Press your hands together. You will notice that there is darkness at the connection point between both hands regardless of how the edge is illuminated. This is called Ambient Occlusion.

SSAO is a relatively cheap technique to obtain that effect in games. It tends to make the contact between objects more realistic.

Poor implementations of SSAO can back fire, and actually, decrease the quality of the scene, like in this example of Farcry 3 (the black outlines):

Here's our take on SSAO+. Please remember this is not complete and will look better :)

SSAO+ (click to enlarge)

OFF vs ON

OFF vs ON

While subtle, I can be, actually, a quite an improvement.

All those effects will be able to be disabled, in case you wish to increase your performance with ease.

LOOT system (click to enlarge)

The loot system we implemented is inspired on games like Farcry, Dying Light and Fallout. While is not exactly super complex as Fallout, is a blend beetween those and lets the player explore the contents of cabinets, boxes, containers, NPCs and much much more. This way, the player can find items to defend himself, but also, will be able to find things like rare weapon skins... so think twice before going to the next area without exploring!

The system have been successful for these games and we don't expect it to be any different for ARRANGEMENT.

That's it for today! Now is time to do arrangements for new year holidays. We wish you an awesome start of 2016, and we will meet again next year!

For those that wave not watched the video, you can find it below. Cheers!

Hes right, that no SSAO. But anyways, it works. But have a huge problem with your 3D getting more and more 2D. That ssao is stealing the 3D depth... You need to extremly tweak that SSAO with an depth buffer.

When i see that white bar for the loot system, the one image that seeps to my mind is the loot system of NOLF2.
Still, actually checking out enemy equipment rather than simply taking their one weapon's mag should be more interesting.

Wait, weapon skins as in variation of submodels or like actual texturegroup reskins?

A video of this is coming soon :) - The NOLF 2 system, actually is kinda similar to our idea. No inventory for special items, but is close to Dying Light, and would use a quick menu display, from FO4 and some ideas from FC3.

Weapon skins would be like the ones in CS:GO (mostly, textures). There's an article about this here: Moddb.com

The item drops works in the same way as RPGs, where there are chances of dropping and rarity, but there's a few ingredients mixed in to keep up the things interesting.

Yes, is still a tactical action game, but we thought the idea blended perfectly, as it increases realism. There are many tiny details that helps that too, way too many to specify, perhaps in another article :)